The Insider has been the student newspaper for the campus community at Pitt-Greensburg since the 1970s (though sometimes under different names). Pitt-Greensburg student Jacob Paciello is using his position as a member of the Frederick Honors College to digitize back issues of the student newspaper, which will aid cultural preservation and serve as the basis of an original research project.
Digitization is a process of converting analog media forms, in this case printed newspapers, to digital formats. By making high resolution images of each issue, attached to rigorous metadata, Jacob is helping preserve the history of a significant cultural document, as The Insider has been student led, written, and edited for decades and thus features campus stories, updates, and reporting specific to student perspectives. Once digitized the files will be maintained by Pitt archivists on the University’s secure storage system in perpetuity, making them freely accessible to the public.
Once complete, Jacob hopes to use the files in their entirety as a corpus of linguistic information with which he might study how students have written about their campus over time.
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